Micronesia, Hawaii, Polynesia, Bora Bora, Seychelles, Maldives, Australia - where does the mind go when imagining such places. Drawn from the best travel blogs and Instagram images, this book brings together the most beautiful locations near, on, or under water. From eco resorts to remote, pristine islands; from sailing on ultra-blue oceans to diving in translucent waters; in aerial and underwater photography, the focus is on finding paradise. Whether thinking about a trip or longing for sun and sand, this book is where those daydreams begin. AUTHOR: Sebastiaan Bedaux works as a freelance lifestyle and travel journalist for several renowned Belgian magazines and newspapers. For the past ten years he has been travelling the world and writing about his holiday experiences on his award-winning travel blog, ambassador.land. SELLING POINTS: * The 20 best Instagram accounts and blogs illustrate paradise on earth - with the focus on the most idyllic beaches, azure seas, both above and below the water surface * A must-have for every adventurous globetrotter with a passion for the sea and water 270 colour images

BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE GUARDIAN, THE OBSERVER (LONDON), GRANTA, AND TLS One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation in this “anti-memoir.” M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and if so, where do we find him? This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notetaking: “A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.” Are these notebooks records of failed presence? How do they shine a light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of a young artist in counterculture London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author? With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate and delight. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation. “Wish I Was Here is a beautifully strange masterwork. It is as if M. John Harrison’s prose devises its own autobiography, while the figure of its author stands to one side tinkering at a eulogy for a dead cat, a manifesto against ruin porn, and a manual of operating procedures for creativity as funky as a Brian Eno card deck. How can this also produce a sublime fugue on memory and aging? Read it and see.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude

Are you bored of the endless scroll of your social media feed? Do you swipe left before considering the human being whose face you just summarily rejected? Do you skim articles on your screen in search of intellectual stimulation that never arrives? If so, this book is the philosophical lifeline you have been waiting for. Offering a timely meditation on the profound effects of constant immersion in technology, also known as the Interface, Wish I Were Here draws on philosophical analysis of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage. Without moralizing, Mark Kingwell takes seriously the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world. While scrolling, swiping, and clicking suggest purposeful action, such as choosing and connecting with others, Kingwell argues that repeated flicks of the finger provide merely the shadow of meaning, by reducing us to scattered data fragments, Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text trends captured by algorithms. Written in accessible language that references both classical philosophers and contemporary critics, Wish I Were Here turns to philosophy for a cure to the widespread unease that something is amiss in modern waking life.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Small Great Things and The Book of Two Ways comes “a powerfully evocative story of resilience and the triumph of the human spirit” (Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six) Rights sold to Netflix for adaptation as a feature film • Named one of the best books of the year by She Reads Diana O’Toole is perfectly on track. She will be married by thirty, done having kids by thirty-five, and move out to the New York City suburbs, all while climbing the professional ladder in the cutthroat art auction world. She’s an associate specialist at Sotheby’s now, but her boss has hinted at a promotion if she can close a deal with a high-profile client. She’s not engaged just yet, but she knows her boyfriend, Finn, a surgical resident, is about to propose on their romantic getaway to the Galápagos—days before her thirtieth birthday. Right on time. But then a virus that felt worlds away has appeared in the city, and on the eve of their departure, Finn breaks the news: It’s all hands on deck at the hospital. He has to stay behind. You should still go, he assures her, since it would be a shame for all of their nonrefundable trip to go to waste. And so, reluctantly, she goes. Almost immediately, Diana’s dream vacation goes awry. Her luggage is lost, the Wi-Fi is nearly nonexistent, and the hotel they’d booked is shut down due to the pandemic. In fact, the whole island is now under quarantine, and she is stranded until the borders reopen. Completely isolated, she must venture beyond her comfort zone. Slowly, she carves out a connection with a local family when a teenager with a secret opens up to Diana, despite her father’s suspicion of outsiders. In the Galápagos Islands, where Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was formed, Diana finds herself examining her relationships, her choices, and herself—and wondering if when she goes home, she too will have evolved into someone completely different.

When Emily Lloyd burst onto the movie scene as a teenager she was hailed as the next Marilyn Monroe. Her stunning performance as precocious Lynda Mansell in David Leland's bitter - sweet comedy - drama ''Wish You Were Here'' thrust her into the spotlight, won her a BAFTA nomination, an Evening Standard Best Actress Award and a National Society of Critics Award and cemented the film's reputation as a British classic. Hollywood beckoned and Emily landed high profile roles alongside A - listers including Bruce Willis and starred with Brad Pitt in Robert Redford's Oscar - winning epic ''A River Runs Through It.'' Yet behind the corkscrew curls and cheeky grin that seduced Tinseltown, Emily was confronting a debilitating mental disorder that threatened to destroy her. Now, in her searingly honest autobiography, Emily describes the incredible highs and agonising lows she experienced through a tumultuous acting career. Packed with fascinating, star - laden anecdotes, starting insights into movie making and moving personal revelations, With I Was There is part celebrity memoir, part examination into the difficulties of combating mental illness while being in the public eye.

A revised and updated edition of the international bestseller Inspiring readers all over the globe to reimagine their future, this revised and updated edition of What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 features new material to complement the classic text. Major life transitions such as leaving the protected environment of school or starting a new career can be daunting. It is scary to face a wall of choices, knowing that no one is going to tell us if we make the right decision. There is no clearly delineated path or recipe for success. Even figuring out how and where to start can be a challenge. As head of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, Tina Seelig’s job is to guide her students as they make the difficult transition from the academic environment to the professional world—providing tangible skills and insights that will last a lifetime. Seelig is a wildly popular and award-winning teacher and in What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 she shares with us what she offers her students –provocative stories, inspiring advice, and a big dose of humility and humor. These pages are filled with captivating examples, from the classroom to the boardroom, of individuals defying expectations, challenging assumptions, and achieving unprecedented success. Seelig throws out the old rules and provides a new model for reaching our potential. We discover how to have a healthy disregard for the impossible; how to recover from failure; and how most problems are remarkable opportunities in disguise. What I Wish I Knew When I Was Twenty is a much-needed book for everyone looking to make their mark in the world.

Love. In Wish I Was Here, Jackie Kay explores every facet of this most overwhelming and complicated of human emotions. In her distinctive voice, simultaneously fierce and delicate, she exposes the moments of tenderness, of shock, of bravery and stupidity that accompany the search for love, the discovery of love and, most of all, love's loss. Every story here resonates with bittersweet lucidity. Fearlessly scrutinizing her characters at their moments of greatest vulnerability, Kay brings the chaotic experience of love -- and of simply living -- into crystalline focus. Wish I Was Here is another work of wondrous emotional intensity and almost blinding illumination by one of our most original and engaging talents. Praise for Why Don't You Stop Talking? ‘The beauty of Kay’s stories is in how much they continue to resonate long after finishing’ Time Out ‘Jackie Kay is a virtuoso of voices that go straight to your guts . . . However different these voices, they all have that warm blend of humour and the detailed noticing of tiny objects which lights up the everyday world and is Kay’s hallmark as a novelist and poet . . . Warm, gently surreal, wittily compassionate and beautifully written’ Independent on Sunday ‘These pieces contain -- and ultimately liberate -- definitively human ordinariness, a rigmarole of isolation and love, fidelity and betrayal, noise and silence, birth and death’ Guardian